Jane Austen in Community

Austen, Cassandra (Richard Bentley) “Jane Austen” Published by Richard Bentley. 1870. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license. http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=3642890&partId=1.

Our Project

The Jane Austen in Community project aims to place Austen’s novel Northanger Abbey in two different kinds of communities. The archival research projects on this website contextualize the novel in the early nineteenth century and display how Austen engaged with the literary, social, and political communities of her time. The second part of this project integrates that contextual information with reading guides and discussion questions for the community reading groups St. Olaf students hosted in Summer 2017. In addition to offering new ways of reading Austen within her contemporary community, we hope these conversations will also help us reflect critically on our own cultural moment.